Prelude to Space by Arthur C Clarke

Author:Arthur C Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

For thirty years the world had been slowly growing used to the idea that, some day, men were going to reach the planets. The phophecies of the early pioneers of astronautics had come true so many times since the first rockets climbed through the stratosphere that few people disbelieved them now. That tiny crater near Aristarchus, and the television films of the other side of the Moon were achievements which could not be denied.

Yet there had been some who had deplored or even denounced them. To the man in the street, interplanetary flight was still a vast, somewhat terrifying possibility fust below the horizon of everyday life. The general public, as yet, had no particular feelings about space flight except the vague realization that "Science" was going to bring it about in the indefinite future.

Two distinct types of mentality, however, had taken astronautics very seriously indeed, though for quite different reasons. The practically simultaneous impact of the long-range rocket and the atomic bomb upon the military mind had, in the 1950's, produced a crop of blood-curdling prophecies from the experts in mechanized murder. For some years there had been much talk of bases on the Moon or even— more appropriately— upon Mars. The United States Army's belated discovery, at the end of the Second World War, of Oberth's twenty-year-old plans for "space-stations" had revived ideas which it was a gross understatement to call "Wellsian."

In his classic book, Wege zur Raumschiffahrt, Oberth

had discussed the building of great "space-mirrors" which could focus sunlight upon the Earth, either for peaceful purposes or for the incineration of enemy cities. Oberth himself never took this last idea very seriously, and must have been surprised at its solemn reception two decades later.

The fact that it would be very easy to bombard the Earth from the Moon, and very difficult to attack the Moon from the Earth, had made many uninhibited military experts declare that, for the sake of peace, their particular country must seize our satellite before any war-mongering rival could reach it. Such arguments were common in the decade following the release of atomic energy, and were a typical by-product of that era's political paranoia. They died, un-lamented, as the world slowly returned to sanity and order.

A second and perhaps more important body of opinion, while admitting that interplanetary travel was possible, opposed it on mystical or religious grounds. The "theological opposition," as it was usually termed, believed that man would be disobeying some divine edict if he ventured away from his world. In the phrase of Interplanetary's earliest and most brilliant critic, the Oxford don C. S. Lewis, astronomical distances were "God's quarantine regulations." If man overcame them, he would be guilty of something not far removed from blasphemy.

Since these arguments were not founded on logic, they were quite irrefutable. From time to time Interplanetary had issued counterblasts, pointing out that the same objections might very well have been brought against all explorers who had ever lived. The astronomical distances which twentieth-century man

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